More From John O’Donohue

“The Banshee’s Grotto”

by Irish writer John O’Donohue, from his collection Conamara Blues:

The bean si is a solitary being . . . (Patricia Lysaght)
I heard her across the river crying: a neighbor was dying. (Paddy O’Donohue)
The tear is the anticipation of the eye’s future. (Joseph Brodsky)

The messenger comes from that distant place
Beside us where we cannot remember
How unlikely it is that we are here,
Keepers of interiors not our own,
Strangers in whom dawn and twilight are one.

When the black door opens, she often appears,
Keeping her distance from the house of grief,
Circling it with her cry until her tears
Have cut a path to the nerve of a name
That soon will stand alone on a headstone.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.